Helpful Microsoft Excel Tips & Tricks

By Frankline Bell


Microsoft Excel is one of those programs that is far more versatile than many people believe. Certainly it allows you to enter and analyze data, but you also can use it for accounting, planning, tracking data, making calendars, creating a budget and much more. While many people know how to use the most basic features of Excel, here are a few cool tricks that you might not have known.

Sometimes when you have a spreadsheet filled with data, you need to move an entire row into another space. To select the entire row quickly, simply click in the row and then hit shift and the spacebar. This will highlight the row, and then you can cut the row entirely or paste it elsewhere on that spreadsheet or another spreadsheet.

For those times when you need to highlight a whole column, just click in the first cell and then find the F8 key at the top of your keyboard. Then click that F8 and then click last cell in your column. You also can use this process to highlight every cell in a spreadsheet. Just click in that very first cell and then in the very last cell and everything will highlight. To end this function, just tap on that F8 again and the function will stop. You also can use this to just highlight a chunk of data within your spreadsheet.

One annoyance is that when you add a great deal of data and you start to move below about the 38th row, you lose the visibility of your header. That might be fine if you just have two or three columns of data, but if you are entering data into a large amount of columns, it is sometimes tough to remember which column is which. For this reason, it is nice to have the header visible all of the time.

To make sure the header appears all the time, you need to look at the right edge of the spreadsheet. There is a small down arrow, then a little box with a dash in it, and then a filled-in up arrow. If you hover over the little box, your cursor will change to an up and down arrow with two horizontal lines. Click and hold and move the bar that appears down until it appears below the header row. This will appear as if you have two headers, but notice as you scroll down that the top header remains.

When you are analyzing data or just need to look at data of a specific criterion, then the ability to sort and filter can be handy. Microsoft excel has a function just for this purpose located along with many other features on the Home tab. This provides you with the ability to sort items alphabetically, to create a custom sort or to filter for specific terms or information. To learn more about Microsoft Excel, there is a help function built into the program located near the top right part of the program. It is a question mark located in a blue circle. This allows you to browse for answers to questions, learn shortcuts and other helpful hints.




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